


Flowers in their Fields

by Koeji



Category: Nier Gestalt | Nier
Genre: Brother Nier, Implied Red & the Black references, Needles, Nier Replicant - Freeform, Vomit, implied rape, it's not really romantic but Kainé/Nier is real anyway, light-ish gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-24
Updated: 2019-02-24
Packaged: 2019-11-05 04:05:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17911676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Koeji/pseuds/Koeji
Summary: Animals in their hunters' hands.





	Flowers in their Fields

**Author's Note:**

> A "commission" for my dear fiancee @quitebrilliantindeed :-)

The twilight after it happens, Kainé cannot bear to leave him alone again, but neither can she bear to watch him sit and sew in the candlelight. His stitches are deft and learned, utilitarian, unlike the sweet flowers she has seen him embroider on spare scraps of fabric to keep his hands idle—flowers that might have once adorned the hems of his little sister’s dresses so she had something pretty to look at in bed.

Yes, the stitches here are short and tight—just enough to keep the garment together. She watches the needle’s rhythm and feels it in her own pulse.

_In, out, in, out, in out._

 “You should go to sleep,” says Kainé.

“I’m fine.”

“You can barely see what you’re doing.”

“Just let me finish up here.”

Kainé strides to where Nier sits on the edge of his mattress and snatches the torn sash away from him, needle and thread all. With a huff, she blows out the candle and leaves the room in darkness. In her mind’s eye, she can see him with his hands frozen in air, and all too clearly the way they would fall to his thighs in resignation. That’s right; it was best for him to give up for the night. He would lay down and rest and then this day, at least, would end.

Outside of the inn’s walls, Kainé holds Nier’s sash up to the sinking sun. She had ripped the last few stitches when she grabbed it from Nier’s hand’s; now the thread stretched between the edges like the gossamer trails of a spider’s web. As she holds it, a thick drop of ruby courses down her arm, sinking deep into each layer of bandage wrapped around her skin. Nier’s sewing needle stands lodged in her palm. Folding Nier’s sash under her other arm, Kainé plucks the needle out. She rolls it between her finger and thumb, and then, like a tailor to a pincushion, buries the tip in each of her fingertips until she is left with strung rubies, and the glint of the needle standing steadfast in her finger.

She wishes it would hurt more. She wishes she had no use for fingers, that she could sever each one at the knuckle. That she could experience the chill of night in her bones, out there in the field alone, nursing a culled cut of blood-hewn meat that would never touch another body in its life.

 

* * *

 

Kainé remembered them because Nier had been kind to them. Three of them—beard, hat, tall boots—circled around a fire in a narrow clearing in the forest, only a thin cut of meat between them. The one with the hat was their best hunter, the only one of the three of them familiar with the area, and he had just gotten a bad sprain in his ankle. She and Nier had just finished checking the traps the two of them had set earlier. Kainé tightened her grip around the hares’ ears as Nier turned to her with that look, the one of magnanimity that so often undid him.

She hadn’t liked them then—especially not the ones with the beard and the hat, those thick sprawling masses that seemed to hide their features. Even so, Kainé felt their eyes upon both of them. They stuck to her breasts and thighs but looked askance at her bandages and the thick peaks of muscle protruding beneath them. They took longer to decipher Nier. Maybe it was that they had to imagine his body, that mass of both cause and effect. Nier’s secrecy was one Kainé herself was familiar with—so too she knew the look of a man trying to worm his way into it.

Kainé tossed them a hare and left it at that.

The next morning, they came upon their camp again. The wood that had held their fire still sparked, and their two tents still stood. A warm kettle sat next to the smoldering embers. They were gone then, but they must have been planning to come back soon. Even the man with the lame leg was gone.

The camp was where Kainé and Nier decided to part for their morning hunt. There were more traps to check and early morning fish to catch. When Nier turned his back to Kainé, she almost stepped toward him—almost reached out for him. But something between will and fate possessed her feet and immobilized her and she let him walk away. When he had disappeared behind a thicket of bushes, she swallowed and turned her feet toward the river.

In the mind of her mind, she had abandoned him already; she felt the calm inhabit her bones, the prepared disbelief that for once in her life shielded her from action. Later, she heard Nier’s single cry from the riverbank.

What force had carried her then? Kainé didn’t want to think about it—whether it was fear or rage or curiosity. Nier’s single cry had made it easy for her to lose those thoughts. It was only a sharp, staccato yell—the same sound he made when he slipped during a steep climb. Until the moment Kainé came upon him, she believed that could be it.

They had been waiting near one of their traps. That made it easy for Kainé to find them. She saw the bright golden hair of some trapped creature mauled between their fingers. It behaved in ways she wasn’t used to seeing in captured animals; she looked upon its silence, its idle jerks and sighs completely devoid of fight, and saw only a passive will to survive and endure.

This behavior, she realized, was not characteristic of a wild animal. It was characteristic of _domestication._

_In, out, in, out, in, out, in out in out in out in out._

The hunters didn’t notice her as they took turns cutting away at the creature. Finally, the creature dropped to the forest floor and they rested. They toed at the crumpled mass at their feet and wiped the shine off their shoes onto its stripped body. Their hands full of fur again, the hunters whispered into the creature’s ear. Then they disappeared past the tree line.

 

* * *

 

She had bundled the creature up and taken it to an inn. It had started to mend its skin. She had hated it for that—for the way it picked itself up as if nothing had happened. She hated how it mended its skin with the same complacency with which she had watched it get stripped bare in the first place.

Kainé takes the needle from her fingertips. She finds a soft spot in the palm of her left hand, and, thinking of Nier’s, drives the point deep into the flesh. She picks up her swords and ties the torn sash around one of the hilts. She sets out into town.

 

* * *

 

The three men are not hard to find. They are the kinds of men that frequent certain places at certain times of day to see certain types of people. Kainé is well-acquainted with their ilk. The village is asleep except for them and their kind—and her. The narrow back alleys surrounding the tavern are suited for her task.

They don’t seem to remember her at first glance. This only serves to anger her more—the thought of how quickly she was cast aside as a target, how much cowardice they must have to prefer a kind man to an unkind woman. As she withdraws her blades, she reminds them. “I am the companion of the man you met in the woods.”

Their faces change then. Kainé has seen such faces before, on the bodies of small animals caught in the snare of a trap.

She thinks at first that she will make it quick. This is for Nier. And she is quick with the first two. By the third, her arm and leg begin to throb for more. There is a voice in her head and her veins that reminds her of how she felt in the woods and the reason the strokes of her blade into the bearded man’s gut feel so familiar. The slowly spreading blood reaches her feet and is spotted with white mucous and flesh, and she recalls the way the creature in the woods had been torn apart and made to overflow with that disdainful fluid. She had done nothing and did not stop until it was over.

Kainé feels the blood of lust and hatred burn through her limbs and limb and thinks of how she did nothing.

The man says something she cannot hear. She places her foot over his mouth and steps down until it gives. Then his body is quiet. Her body is quiet. It tightens in silence.

A voice whispers behind her. “Kainé?”

Kainé looks over her shoulder. In the alley’s half-light, Nier brings his hands to his open mouth. Kainé can see his thighs quivering. He turns and empties his stomach against one of the alley walls. She does not want to imagine his face.

“You followed me,” she says.

Nier coughs and spits. “Course I did,” he mutters. “I was worried.”

She hates him for telling her that with a mouth full of bile. She looks down at the three bodies circling her feet, barricading the space between herself and Nier. There will be nowhere for him to look when he finally comes back up for air. Her feet will trail their insides back to camp with them. She nudges one man’s body to the side of the alley, and as Nier continues to empty himself, he does not know how he stopped her—how much more she would have done. How easily she could have mounted them and pulled their teeth from their gums, their hearts from their chests, their damned cocks from the rest of them. Nier would not have wanted her to do even as much as she did—but how much of this she had done for him, she cannot say.

“I’m sorry,” he chokes out. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be reacting this way. Not when I…”

Nier heaves a last ragged sigh and breathes deep. Right—there are still parts to him that Kainé cannot see, can only surmise. There are things about her that are the same for him.

She unties the sash from the hilt of her blade. It’s heavier than it was when she tied it; its frayed ends have taken on the blood, turned it a darker shade of black. As she passes him, she presses it into his chest.

Nier lets the sash fall over his hands. He follows Kainé out of town.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading!! btw this wasn't written with the intention of being porn but if you're into it then go ahead. In 2019 we stop being ashamed of our kinks. Fight me in the Applebee's parking lot


End file.
